The Platt Amendment, an affront that taught us lessons for life

On February 25, 1901, the United States Congress coldly approved an appendix to its Army Expenditure Bill, known two days later as the Platt Amendment.

It was an unheard-of text that would later be imposed, by force, on the contents of the first Constitution of the Republic of Cuba, drafted by the Constituent Assembly that same year, made up of more than a few patriots opposed to the monstrosity.

Back on that dark February 25, with the aforementioned approval, the Committee on Cuban Affairs of the U.S. Senate officially included in its legislation, without any right whatsoever, a proposal drafted by Senator Orville Platt, who gave it its name.

Something that in practice would make its validity irremovable for a very long time, an ugly habit that has been used since then in that country by the authors of perverse and inhumane engenderings against less powerful, though heroic, nations.

As for the Platt Amendment, on the following March 2, it was approved by the House and sent to President William McKinley, who sanctioned it a day later.

The principles of the created instrument were made known in the so-called Letter of Elihu Root, Secretary of War of the United States, to the then Governor of Cuba, General Leonard Wood, who usurped the power stolen from the Cubans by intervening and invading the Island at the end of the War of Independence of the Mambises against Spain (1898).

It is said that Wood chose as a scenario to communicate to the delegates of the Cuban Constituent Assembly the issue of the Amendment that had become the Law of his country, a hunt in the Cienaga de Zapata to which he had "graciously" invited some of those in charge of the relations of the new republic to be born, with its northern neighbor.

There they also learned that it was an unappealable ruling. Either we accepted that - since my time I feel part of it - or the United States would continue to occupy Cuba militarily.

The document presented to the Cuban patriots stated unequivocally that the government of the Republic of Cuba could never establish a treaty or agreement with foreign powers -other than the United States, of course- that would compromise its independence. What kind of independence they were talking about at that point, we do not know.

They were equally meticulous in specifying that the Cubans could not allow their soil to serve as a base for war operations against the United States army, self-proclaimed as the rescuers of the independence of the Caribbean Island, an atrocious manipulation of history, since freedom was about to be achieved at the cost of sacrifices and years of struggle by the sons and daughters of this land.

He also announced that the regularization of relations between his great nation would soon take place, by means of a Reciprocity Treaty, which would benefit trade and the sanitation of the poor, unhealthy and disease-ridden country of indigents that was Cuba.

With this, they argued, they were also complying with the rulings of the Joint Resolution approved on April 20, 1898, in the Treaty of Paris, called For the recognition of the independence of the Cuban people.

On that date, the Spanish government was demanded to totally abandon its authority over Cuba and the United States was given a free license to use its military forces at sea and on land to "bring order" to this nation of outrages. "How humanitarian and democratic we are," they told the world as they do today, hiding the rapacity of the Monroe Doctrine.

The humiliation was even more sadistic when they imposed that it should be present as an appendix or ordinance of the text of the Constitution of the Free Cuba that their best children had dreamed of so much.

Of course, there were assembly delegates and worthy Cubans who publicly opposed and fought within the created body against such an outrageous imposition. There were even massive popular mobilizations opposed to it and to the U.S. intervention.

We were then a country that had just come out of a war and a re-concentration of inhabitants that killed thousands and impoverished it even more, and yet there was courage to defend the dignity of the Homeland that the Creoles wanted to be born.

The mambises Manuel Sanguily and Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, and the outstanding journalist and revolutionary Juan Gualberto Gomez, man of confidence of Jose Marti during the preparations for the Necessary War in Cuba, were among those who did not accept the imposition. A representation of the assembly members traveled to the United States to express the resolute disagreement of the genuine Cuban patriots. But to no avail.

The U.S. government was determined to give the finishing touch to what was the worldwide launching of its interventionist policy: the so-called Spanish-American war, which is rarely remembered as what it was: the Cuban-Spanish-American war.

From that moment on, the expansion of an empire was born, an empire that today the planet knows quite well, in spite of how manipulative and deceitful they have become, and the power they employ in it, with sophisticated and mind-blowing technology in between.

From its very first article, the Platt Amendment has severed Cuba's sovereignty by prohibiting it from interacting with the world without its sacrosanct approval, subordinating it to the voracious invasion of its capital, turning Cuba into a kingdom of Yankee plundering entities and making it a monoproducer, a large landowner and deforesting it even more.

One of its most terrible sections, the consequences of which we are still suffering despite its total moral and legal illegitimacy, is the seventh, which stipulates the right of the United States to establish naval bases in our territory. The one in Guantanamo, in territory usurped by force, is still on the list of our reasons for struggle and claims.

The Platt Amendment was abolished or eliminated in 1934, partly due to the consequences of the organization of a strong popular movement that had overthrown the bloody dictatorship of the surrendered dictator Gerardo Machado a year earlier. And also because the power already had a well-structured and organized policy of theft and control of the Cuban economy, thanks to the engendro.

But the lesson he taught us has never been forgotten by the Cubans. Let the invaders say so, if not.